By Tim Graham | September 14, 2015 | 1:19 PM EDT

In the run-up to the papal visit to America, The Washington Post keeps pushing stories against allegedly heartless Catholic positions on the life issues. On Monday’s front page, they promoted this story: “A Catholic hospital in Michigan cited religious reasons for refusing to perform a tubal ligation requested by a woman with a brain tumor.” (Emphasis theirs.)

The headline on page A-3 was “Mich. hospital faces ACLU suit: Pregnant woman with brain tumor was denied sterilization surgery.” Post “social change” reporter Sandhya Somashekhar promoted the ACLU’s staunch opposition to Catholic hospitals having anti-feminist hangups about abortion and sterilization. 

By Tom Blumer | May 6, 2015 | 10:09 AM EDT

The headline at Sandhya Somashekhar's Washington Post column on Pamela Geller, whose Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest was the target of a failed terrorist attack, acts as if that attack is her fault: "Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas."

Somashekhar's work reeks of contempt for Geller and her efforts, even going beyond the media malfeasance cited in the Brent Bozell-Tim Graham column posted at NewsBusters Tuesday evening.

By Matthew Balan | March 30, 2015 | 4:11 PM EDT

On Monday, the Washington Post's Sandhya Somashekhar zeroed in on the "unabashed approach" of Carafem, Washington, DC's latest abortion center, which, in her words, "reflects a new push to destigmatize the nation's most controversial medical procedure by talking about it openly and unapologetically." Somashekhar, the liberal newspaper's "social change" reporter, spotlighted how the upstart "aims to feel more like a spa than a medical clinic."

By Tim Graham | November 19, 2014 | 7:43 AM EST

Washington Post “social change reporter” Sandhya Somashekhar wrote a front-page story for Wednesday’s editions on how the Barilla pasta company completely surrendered to the gay left. The headline was “A recipe for recovery: Barilla makes amends to gay groups.”

As usual, the Post divided the conflict into “gay rights groups” and “social conservatives.” Gay activist Bob Witeck described the conservative view as “stupid and backwards.” Conservatives said...nothing. There was no space for rebuttal. “Social change” moves faster when “backwards” gets censored.

By Tim Graham | November 12, 2014 | 8:37 AM EST

The Washington Post has appointed a “social change reporter,” Sandhya Somashekar, and her front-page story on Wednesday promoted black protesters surrounding the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. The subhead was “Protesters aim to keep pricking the consciousness of whites and the political establishment.”

Somashekar made absolutely zero reference to the Post’s earlier reporting that seven or eight African American eyewitnesses are backing up the account of police officer Darren Wilson that Michael Brown was fighting for the policeman’s gun, causing Wilson to fire in self-defense.

By Tom Blumer | May 24, 2014 | 12:51 AM EDT

The press continues its disinterested fiddling while the royal mess known as Obamacare burns through money and exhausts the patience of those attempting any kind of oversight.

One of the more obvious examples of this is how the Washington Post's May 17 story on errors in calculating Obamacare subsidies has gone absolutely nowhere. About one-third of the 20 results returned in a Google News search on "healthcare subsidies" (not in quotes) at 11 p.m. ET Friday evening were partial reprints or rewrites of the original story by WaPo reporters Amy Goldstein and Sandhya Somashekhar. Most of the remaining results were from center-right outlets, while a few came from medical sites. The results didn't change much when searching on "health care" instead of "healthcare." What the WaPo pair reported is a breathtaking cacophony of incompetence which, as Heritage noted last year, won't even "solve" itself when Obamacare enrollees file their 2014 tax returns. Goldstein and Somashekhar also missed an opportunity to make a fundamental point, which is that everyone who has enrolled has some exposure.

By Tim Graham | March 31, 2014 | 8:40 AM EDT

It’s the bland leading the bland as Obamacare enrollment (sort of) ends. The front page of Monday’s Washington Post carries the headline “New fronts in health battle: Challenges after sign-up milestone.” (Yawn.) The pull quote inside on A-2 is “The unresolved issues mean it is far too soon to know how President Obama’s signature domestic achievement will turn out.”

In that case, why use the word “achievement”? Did they describe the Iraq War as Bush's "signature achievement"?  In doing so, the Post sounds just like Obama adviser David Plouffe, whom they quoted from ABC saying “The law’s working” and it’s a “seminal achievement.” The Post account left out Bill Kristol’s response on ABC that Democrats aren’t saying “the law’s working” on the campaign trail.

By Ken Shepherd | January 30, 2014 | 5:45 PM EST

Some 47 percent of uninsured Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 are now unfavorable towards ObamaCare, the highest negative marks among that demographic since May 2012, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That number could be considerably higher as the margin of error is plus/minus 8 percentage points.

Nevertheless, reporting on the newly-released Kaiser survey, the Washington Post's Sandhya Somashekhar buried those statistics towards the end of her 11-paragraph page A4 story, while spinning the news as largely a PR challenge for the Obama administration and ObamaCare backers on the Left (emphasis mine):

By Ken Shepherd | January 13, 2014 | 6:35 PM EST

The Obama administration today revealed that more than half of the sign-ups for ObamaCare are aged 45 and older, hardly the sort of young, healthy insurance pool the White House was hoping for.

On their websites, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times all focused on the older/sicker skew of the Healthcare.gov signups. The Washington Post, however, tried to accentuate the positive for the administration. "Young adults make up almost one-quarter of health sign-ups," cheered the WashingtonPost.com headline [see collage of headlines below the page break]. But as Louise Radnofsky reported for the Journal (emphasis mine):

By Ken Shepherd | December 4, 2013 | 1:13 PM EST

According to the letter of the law, the much-talked-about federal subsidies for purchasing ObamaCare are only to be disbursed to eligible customers who bought them via state-run health care exchanges, NOT the federal HealthCare.gov website, argue plaintiffs in a lawsuit before a federal district court in Washington, D.C. The Obama administration, you may recall, is promising subsidies regardless of whether they are purchased from the federal exchange or state exchanges.

Reporting on the lawsuit in today's paper, the Washington Post's Sandhya Somashekhar waited until halfway through her page A2 article -- headlined "Health-law critics see case as their last, best shot" in the print edition -- to summarize the legal reasoning behind the plaintiffs in the case. What's more, the Post staff writer seasoned her article throughout with loaded language attacking the lawsuit (emphasis mine):

By Tim Graham | November 20, 2013 | 10:18 AM EST

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that President Obama “sought to redirect some of the political blame for the botched rollout of the federal health insurance exchange to Republicans, characterizing GOP lawmakers as rooting for the law’s failure.” But Post reporters Philip Rucker and Sandhya Somashekhar never found a Republican to rebut. Everyone quoted in the story was a member of Team Obama.

“One of the problems we’ve had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure,” Obama said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting in Washington. Obama echoed Rush Limbaugh, who said during the Iraq War in the Bush years that Sen. Harry Reid and other Democrats were “invested in defeat.” Obama could blame a “toxic” political atmosphere, and somehow that didn’t include anything he said or any of his lies about Obamacare:

By Ken Shepherd | July 24, 2013 | 5:10 PM EDT

ObamaCare is a poison pill that has unintended consequences for part-time employees all over the country, including in the Washington Post's backyard. The liberal paper cannot simply ignore such developments, but when it covers such developments, you can be sure it will find ways to spin the story to take blame away from President Obama and direct it towards conservative Republicans.

Take Sandhya Somashekhar's July 24 print edition front-pager, "Health law's unintended impact on part-timers." The Post staff writer opened by introducing readers to one Kevin Pace, a Northern Virginia Community College adjunct instructor whose employer "slashed his hours this spring to avoid a Jan. 1 requirement that full-time workers for large employers be offered health insurance." "We work so hard for so little pay," Pace groused, "You would think they would want to make an investment in society, pay the teachers back and give us health care," he told Somashekhar, who similarly closed out the article by giving Pace the last word: